Re: repackaging material

[William Spencer Watson <wswatson@indiana.edu>]

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Brian Cady wrote:

> Even though I'm about to hit The Who for this on the "Meaty Beaty Big & Bouncy"
> website I'm building, there is some truth to this.  I recently set out to buy a
> Small Faces greatest hits collection.  With imports there must be 30 of them
> available!


Okay, I give.  Y'all have sufficiently convinced me I was basically full
of crap with my rather careless statement that The Who are probably the
worst when it comes to repackaging.  So they are just "par for the
course."  "Meaty Beaty" was one of the albums I had in mind.  Isn't it
still the only place one can get the studio version of "Substitute?"  This
is the kind of scenario I object to--albums that have material available
on multiple sources, EXCEPT for one or two songs.  Another example:  the
videocassette "Who's Better Who's Best" doesn't have the Russell Harty
"Relay" but the Laserdisc does have it.  Why?  It's not like there wasn't
enough room on the videocassette.  Ditto for the '82 Who Rocks America
videocassette versus the Laserdisc one, which has extra material.  Maybe
in that case space was an issue though.  The "Thirty Years" boxed set is
another one that bothers me.  When it came out it had lots of unreleased
stuff, which is why I was willing to shell out over $50 for it.  Then in
the following years they began reissuing the individual albums and many of
the bonus tracks were things already on the Box Set, so that now there are
not many tracks left on it that aren't available elsewhere.  Can't you
just see Bill Curbishley, et al sitting in an office somewhere saying
"Okay, we'll give them these few tracks on this album, and then these
couple on the next release, and ...."  Aaaagh!!!!

Bill